A showcase for a famed artist’s work, more than pondering his death at 39.

West Wind: The Vision of Tom Thomson reaches its first mainstream audience on Bravo! Sun. Oct. 7 after a round of special screenings at film festivals, galleries and movie houses that’s kept the documentary in the news for weeks now.

Timing the world broadcast debut for Thanksgiving can be no coincidence. Fall’s blazing colours inevitably are seen through the eyes of “our greatest colourist.” Thomson’s contribution “to the Canadian imagination” is in fact West Wind’s leitmotif. He made “a people feel at home in their own country” says Charles Hill, Canadian art curator at the National Gallery of Canada. West Wind is perhaps the first unapologetically feel-good visit to Thomson’s enigmatic life and maybe the last. Most prior Thomson studies — documentaries, books, articles, a musical and an art film — were triggered by the long-held suspicion that his death in Algonquin Park, July 8, 1917 was an unsolved murder. The enticing plot — with its bungling local coroner and over-anxious friends wanting to do the right thing by his body, waterlogged after eight days in Canoe Lake — is the subject of Dark Pines: A Documentary Investigation Into the Death of Tom Thomson, an earlier show that ran on Bravo!

Ignoring the consequences of Thomson’s death is as unthinkable in a Canadian context as it would be for the international art-world to ignore Picasso’s death if there had been similar circumstances says Dennis Reid, one of many Canadian art experts in West Wind. “You can’t think about Tom Thomson without thinking about his end,” Reid adds.

West Wind however was mostly driven by the need to make “a good film about his life” insisted Peter Raymont, co-director with Michèle Hozer, before the project had really taken off a few years back. Melding Thomson’s landscapes with newly filmed imagery of Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park, allows West Wind to unravel at a pace sufficiently measured for the contemplation of Thomson’s paintings. It’s as much a meditation on Tom Thomson life and art as a biography, although its unruffled pace may feel too leisurely at times for those used to TV’s hectic rhythms.

A genuine jolt of energy comes. However, at the outset from David Thomson, the country’s leading Thomson collector — and a star-quality screen presence as it turns out.

Looking like someone the cranky loner painter might have wanted to hang out with, David Thomson ratchets up the intensity needed to understanding everything that follows in West Wind. This Thomson is the documentary’s main discovery through his craggy presence and entirely impassioned understanding of Tom Thomson’s work. In talking about the painter being “in the moment,” the collector sounds as if he’s in the same moment.

West Wind helps deepen our understanding of the influences in the painter’s life, if not the life itself, by way of vintage film and photography, dramatic reconstructions and the voices of actors Susan Coyne, Gordon Pinsent and Eric Peterson — who sounds more weathered than birch bark.

We’re reminded that Thomson’s youth in the Owen Sound area was privileged due to his father’s inheritance. We’re told that he immersed himself in music, magazines and other media during his sojourn in gold rush Seattle in the early 1900s as a graphic designer-in training. It’s noted that despite his fondness for fishing and wilderness living, Thomson remained a city boy at heart, loving the bustle of downtown Toronto life. Otherwise, any over-all critical assessment comes to the familiar conclusion that the painter had only just discovered his groove when he died at 39.

There’s another discovery suggested here, though. In faming Thomson’s death in terms of World War I, West Wind points the way to the possibility of another film investigating the impact of “the war to end war” on Canadian art. Thomson and other painters, including the Group of Seven were nagged through their lives by their ambivalence about this war. Outsiders questioned their bravery and manliness. Thomson, who said, “I’ve done my best to enlist,” got into a raging argument about the war not many hours before he went his own lonely way, out on Canoe Lake.